Jewish students on American campuses today enjoy a unique and unenviable
distinctionthey are members of the only group targeted by high-profile
hate-mongers, including Khalid Muhammed, Tony Martin, Louis Farrakhan, Israel
Shahak, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Schoenman and innumerable other lesser-known
figures. The animosity toward Zionism and Jews expounded by these individuals
often finds sympathetic reflection in student newspapers, quarterlies, flyers,
banners and alumni publications and often unites disparate campus groups such as
African-American, Latino and Muslim organizations.

At the University of Massachusetts, where a seemingly relentless parade of
extremist speakers has besieged the Jewish community in recent years, the
student daily Collegian has regularly fueled slanders about Israel,
Zionism and the Jewish people. This May saw the appearance of yet another spate
of attacks. One author, identified as Omar Ali from the Coalition for the
Defense of Palestine, charged in a long tirade that "Israelis have chosen
oppression, occupation, invasion, and violence motivated by pathological racism."
On May 2 the Collegian published a letter by an emeritus professor of
mathematics stating that "Judaism and the Jewish identity are offensive to
most human beings and will always cause trouble between the Jews and the rest of
the human race." After a first, tepid reply the school's chancellor
responded forcefully in denouncing the anti-Semitic letter.

At Harvard's Crimson Israel's Independence Day was heralded on May
3rd by a lengthy article claiming the creation of the Jewish state was an act of
ruthless dispossession of the native population. A rejoinder by two "Harvard
Students for Israel" expressed a poignant truth about the current
atmosphere on campuses. Allowing that they had grown used to defending Israel
against cynical distortions of history, they wrote of their disappointed hope "that
the famous handshake on the White House lawn was a sign of a new era of
constructive dialogue."

That era may be long in arriving. From the West Coast to the East, the
trend of recent years, in which virulent anti-Semitism merges with anti-Zionism,
has not slackened but intensified. Thus Kwame Toure, the former Stokely
Carmichael of 1960's Black Power fame, tours campuses collecting honoraria often
derived from mandatory student fees. For nearly twenty years Toure has followed
this route, propounding the notion that "the only good Zionist is a dead
Zionist," and providing for his listeners a pamphlet entitled "Smash
Zionism." He's brought his particular form of torment to students at
hundreds of campuses, from elite Ivy League schools to state and community
colleges. Speaking to a sellout crowd of 500 at the University of Maryland in
April, where he received "around $1100" in payment from student fees,
he informed cheering listeners that "Zionism is the enemy of humanity."
His lies and distortions are rarely challenged by campus media.

A particularly nasty series of events last year at Santa Monica College in
southern California illustrates the crucial role of administrative leadership -
or the lack thereof. The African Student Union sponsored a talk by Ralph
Schoenman. Well-known for his paranoid world view and diatribes against Israel
and the United States, he told his audience that Jews dominated the slave trade,
Zionists collaborated with the Nazis to create the Holocaust and Israel is an
apartheid state where Palestinians are the true Jews. Incendiary flyers called
for united efforts to crush Zionism.

The Corsair, Santa Monica's student newspaper, fanned the flames of
anti-Jewish hostility, reporting Schoenman's scurrilous charges as fact, without
comment, and charging the Hillel Club pursued a "witch hunt" in
responding to these and other venomous denunciations of Israel. The school
administration under President Richard Moore ignored pleas by Jewish students
that he exert the authority of his office to deplore this and other grave
instances of defamation. Deflecting all such entreaties, Moore sent a memo to
the college leadership that asked, "So. What should be done? Officially,
nothing!"

In contrast, only weeks earlier when Latino students expressed
dissatisfaction with a cartoon and Corsair article concerning illegal
immigrants, items only obliquely critical of Latinos, emphatic apologies by
school officials, including the president, had been swiftly issued. Fortunately,
the abject response by officials to Jewish appeals at Santa Monica is not the
reaction everywhere, as administrators at San Francisco State and the University
of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, for example, have demonstrated by their forthright and
prompt repudiation of anti-Jewish bigotry at their own schools.

Jewish students face equally difficult challenges from strident pro-Arab,
anti-Israel campaigns emanating from such groups as the University of
California, Berkeley's, Muslim Student Association. At a February 24th rally
there demonstrators waved placards equating Israel with the Nazis, calling
Israel the cancer of the Middle East and vowing destruction of the Jewish state.
Jewish students also reported verbal threats by participants. Similarly
aggressive and hostile campaigns have confronted students at, for example,
McGill University in Montreal where the campus Daily has taken an openly
pro-Palestinian position in articles and editorials and where the General Union
of Palestinian Students, a PLO-sponsored organization with active groups on
campuses around the world, promotes anti-Israel activity.

Perhaps most bewildering and destructive to all who hear their message are
the Jewish anti-Semites and anti-Zionists. A surreal gathering at MIT this past
year attended by 600 people saw the joint appearance of Israel Shahak and Noam
Chomsky, two more veterans on the campus speakers circuit. Though marked by
attacks against Jews reminiscent of the Nazis - Shahak preaches the inherent
evil of Judaism and relates virulent anecdotes of supposed Jewish persecution of
Christians, while Chomsky's loathing of Jews leads him to endorse Holocaust
deniers - the event prompted no outcry in the media, no denunciation by campus
administrators, no revulsion from Jewish communal leadership. Indeed, there was
no reaction at all, so commonplace is the spewing of extreme anti-Semitic
slander in the halls of academe.

Gatherings such as this might be ultimately benign if the marketplace of
ideas were functioning - if balancing events countered the slanders. But,
despite the typically admirable efforts of at least a nucleus of determined
students on most campuses, that task is often beyond the powers of
nineteen-year-olds. Adult assistance from Hillels, faculty and community
agencies is effective at times, but is frequently overwhelmed by the needs. Yet
the seriousness of deteriorating conditions for Jewish students, and for all
students exposed to virulent distortions about Israel without the antidote of
truth, cannot be ignored. The Anti-Defamation League's recent report of a 168%
increase in anti-Semitic incidents on campuses since 1988 points to the
worsening circumstances.

What is to be done? One obvious lesson of the last ten years is that school
administrators have to exert strong leadership by speaking out forcefully in
defense of all vulnerable students. That includes Jewish students. The First
Amendment is not a moral loophole for standing by while hate-mongers foment
anti-Semitism, and its invocation in this context by campus administrators who
regularly take forceful action against hate-mongering directed at other groups
is, at best, hypocritical. Clear and widely-publicized guidelines for
administrative action might be an important beginning. Students, faculty,
parents, and administrators would then be aware of the obligations of campus
leaders and could expect that anti-Jewish bigotry would be unflinchingly
stigmatized.